Liberty as the Invariant Basis of Moral Truth Subsuming Scanlon’s Contractualism, Parfit’s Moral Objectivism, Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, and the Sen–Nussbaum Capabilities Approach

This article develops Objective Morality, a liberty-based framework grounded in the invariant structure of conscious agency. Morality is identified not as a social construct but as an emergent property of beings capable of evaluating their own conduct, of experiencing affect from that evaluation, and of recognizing that individual benefit derives from conduct prioritizing mutual benefit. Because awareness necessarily involves orientation, preference is a constitutive feature of consciousness, and liberty understood as non-imposition is the only arrangement in which no agent's preference is realized at the expense of another's capacity to act. From this foundation moral obligation follows: to refrain from objective imposition, whether direct or circumstantial. The paper then engages five influential positions — Scanlon's contractualism, Kantian deontology, consequentialism, the Sen–Nussbaum capabilities approach, and Berlin's two concepts of liberty — identifying in each the mechanism by which right action is determined, and the point at which that mechanism requires a criterion it does not supply, converges on one it supplies incompletely, or reaches a verdict the criterion would have determined. The result is an account that reaches the conclusions these frameworks reach where they succeed, and determines the cases they leave open.